To the Chinese, they are symbols of longevity and sexual vitality. They are collected as pets, used in potions and elixirs, sold as lucky charms. The long list of what they supposedly cure runs from sexual dysfunction to acne.
As a result, turtles and tortoises are among the most illegally trafficked and endangered animals in the world.
“Chinese culture is bad for turtles,” Ross Kiester, scientist at New York City’s Turtle Conservancy, explains in the new book “Dreaming in Turtle” (St. Martin’s Press), out Nov. 20. “Turtles are becoming the orchids of the animal kingdom.”
The Chinese decimated their turtle population first. One of the rarest species native to the country — the Yunnan box turtle — goes for $200,000 on the black market and is sold on “the same international trade routes that are used to run guns and drugs,” writes the book’s author, journalist Peter Laufer.
These small, dull brown turtles are nothing special to look at. Measuring just 6 inches from head to tail and weighing a couple of pounds, “they do not appear particularly distinctive — rather much like a box turtle one may find in the Southwest US,” says Laufer.
But their rarity makes them prized for collectors “who seek something forbidden that others do not hold.”
Yunnan box turtles became so threatened that for 50 years they were considered extinct. That’s until 2006 when one showed up for sale in China’s Jingxing Market. This “excited researchers, breeders and turtle lovers who learned that the species they thought was lost forever had in fact survived,” writes Laufer.
Unfortunately, it also excited poachers and collectors, who will fork out ungodly sums to get their hands on one.
And with the supply of Chinese turtles dwindling, American varieties have recently become a hot commodity.
“The Chinese have already driven their own species to near extinction, and now they are raiding ours,” Paul Gibbons, chief operating officer of the Behler Chelonian Center, a turtle conservancy in California, told the Los Angeles Times in 2017.
Up until less than a decade ago, smugglers illegally imported turtles to the United States — but now native turtles are leaving this country in unprecedented numbers.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service exclusively monitored for incoming illegal turtles 10 years ago; “now about half of their efforts are concerned with outgoing,” Laufer says.
According to a Texas State University study, a total of 126 million freshwater turtles were exported from the United States between 2002 and 2012, many of which were illegally supplied to the food and animal markets in Asia. “It’s as if Oregon marijuana growers were selling cannabis in Mexico,” writes Laufer.
Common American varieties such as box turtles, mud turtles and painted turtles are, according to Laufer, “among the most prized abroad.” Laufer says that a turtle worth a few hundred dollars in the US is worth a few thousand dollars in Asia.
Now 40 percent of the turtles and tortoises in the United States are threatened with extinction. Though habitat loss, fishing and road deaths hurt their numbers, “collection for the pet trade is a major threat to tortoises and freshwater turtles worldwide,” according to the Turtle Conservation Coalition.
But it is possible to combat the Chinese turtle trade. When the Burmese star — a tortoise with a striking star pattern on its carapace that goes for about $2,000 on the black market — almost became extinct, its native country of Myanmar launched a captive breeding program to save them. The Minsontaung Wildlife Sanctuary started with less than 200 tortoises in 2004 and has released around 1,000 into the wild as of 2017.
Meanwhile, Canadian smuggler Kai Xu, who was arrested in Michigan with 51 live turtles hidden in his pants, was sentenced to five years in jail in 2016. Years before he would have been slapped on the wrist with a fine — but this jail sentence shows that Americans are finally taking the threat to our hardbacks seriously.
The fight against the illicit turtle trade can’t come soon enough, say experts. “If Earth’s environment cannot continue to support a stoic animal that’s been thriving on the planet since the time of dinosaurs,” writes Laufer, “the rest of the animal kingdom must be considered in jeopardy and we humans — animals ourselves — should worry.”
